The
Making of a Global Security State
The Five Uncontrollable Urges of a Secrecy-Surveillance World
By Tom Engelhardt
As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we’ve come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 -- waves of leaks, videos, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery, and government threats. When a flood sweeps you away, it’s always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage. Here’s my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this developing story (which, it is promised, will go on for weeks, if not months) and identify five urges essential to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us glimpse.
The Five Uncontrollable Urges of a Secrecy-Surveillance World
By Tom Engelhardt
As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we’ve come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 -- waves of leaks, videos, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery, and government threats. When a flood sweeps you away, it’s always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage. Here’s my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this developing story (which, it is promised, will go on for weeks, if not months) and identify five urges essential to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us glimpse.
1.
The Urge to be Global
Corporately speaking, globalization has been ballyhooed since at
least the 1990s, but in governmental terms only in the
twenty-first century has that globalizing urge fully infected
the workings of the American state itself. It’s become common
since 9/11 to speak of a “national security state.” But if a
week of ongoing revelations about NSA surveillance practices has
revealed anything, it’s that the term is already grossly
outdated. Based on what we now know, we should be talking about
an American global security state.
Much
attention has, understandably enough, been lavished on the phone
and other metadata about American citizens that the NSA is now
sweeping up and about the ways in which such activities may
be
abrogating the First and Fourth
Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Far less attention has
been paid to the ways in which the NSA (and other U.S.
intelligence outfits) are sweeping up global data in part via
the just-revealed
Prism and other surveillance programs.
Sometimes,
naming practices are revealing in themselves, and the National
Security Agency’s key data mining tool, capable in March 2013 of
gathering “97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer
networks worldwide,”
has been named “boundless informant.” If you want a sense
of where the
U.S. Intelligence Community imagines itself going, you
couldn’t ask for a better hint than that word “boundless.” It
seems that for our spooks, there are, conceptually speaking, no
limits left on this planet.
Today,
that "community" seeks to put not just the U.S., but the world
fully under its penetrating gaze. By now, the first “heat map”
has been published showing where such information is being
sucked up from monthly: Iran tops the list (14 billion pieces of
intelligence); then come Pakistan (13.5 billion), Jordan (12.7
billion), Egypt (7.6 billion), and India (6.3 billion). Whether
you realize this or not, even for a superpower that has
unprecedented numbers of military bases scattered
across the planet and has
divided the world into six military commands, this
represents something new under the sun. The only question is
what?
The
twentieth century was the century of “totalitarianisms.” We
don’t yet have a name, a term, for the surveillance structures
Washington is building in this century, but there can be no
question that, whatever the
present constraints on the system, “total” has something to
do with it and that we are being ushered into a new world.
Despite the recent leaks, we still undoubtedly have a very
limited picture of just what the present American surveillance
world really looks like and what it plans for our future. One
thing is clear, however: the ambitions behind it are staggering
and global.
In the
classic totalitarian regimes of the previous century, a secret
police/surveillance force attempted, via every imaginable
method, including informers, wire tappers, torture techniques,
imprisonment, and so on to take total control of a national
environment, to turn every citizen’s life into the equivalent of
an open book, or more accurately a closed, secret file lodged
somewhere in that police system. The most impressive of these
efforts, the most global, was the Soviet one simply because the
USSR was an imperial power with a set of disparate almost-states
-- those SSRs of the Caucasus and Central Asia -- within its
borders, and a series of Eastern European satellite states under
its control as well. None of the twentieth-century totalitarian
regimes, however, ever imagined doing the same thing on a
genuinely global basis. There was no way to do so.
Washington’s urge to take control of the global communications
environment, lock, stock, and chat room, to gather its “data” --
billions and billions of pieces of it -- and via inconceivably
powerful computer systems, mine and arrange it, find patterns in
it, and so turn the world into a secret set of connections,
represents a remarkable development. For the first time, a
great power wants to know, up close and personal, not just what
its own citizens are doing, but those of distant lands as well:
who they are communicating with, and how, and why, and what they
are buying, and where they are travelling, and who they are
bumping into (online and over the phone).
Until
recently, once you left the environs of science fiction, that
was simply beyond imagining. You could certainly find
precursors for such a development in, for instance, the Cold War
intelligence community’s urge to create a global satellite
system that would bring every inch of the planet under a new
kind of surveillance regime, that would map it thoroughly and
identify what was being
mapped down to the square inch, but nothing so globally up
close and personal.
The next
two urges are intertwined in such a way that they might be
thought as a single category: your codes and theirs.
2.
The Urge to Make You Transparent
The urge
to possess you, or everything that can be known about you, has
clearly taken possession of our global security state. With
this, it’s become increasingly apparent, go other disturbing
trends. Take something seemingly unrelated: the recent
Supreme Court decision that allows the police to take a DNA
swab from an arrestee (if the crime he or she is charged with is
“serious”). Theoretically, this is being done for
“identification” purposes, but in fact it's already being put to
other uses entirely, especially in the solving of separate
crimes.
If you
stop to think about it, this development, in turn, represents a
remarkable new level of state intrusion on private life, on your
self. It means that, for the first time, in a
sure-to-widen set of circumstances, the state increasingly
has access not just -- as with NSA surveillance -- to your
Internet codes and modes of communication, but to your most
basic code of all, your DNA. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it
in his dissent in the case, “Make no mistake about it: As an
entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA
can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are
ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”
Can global DNA databases be far behind?
If your
DNA becomes the possession of the state, then you are a
transparent human being at the most basic level imaginable. At
every level, however, the pattern, the trend, the direction is
the same (and it’s the same whether you’re talking about the
government or giant corporations). Increasingly, access to you,
your codes,
your communications, your purchases, your
credit card transactions, your location, your travels, your
exchanges with friends, your tastes, your likes and dislikes is
what’s wanted -- for what’s called your “safety” in the case of
government and your business in the case of corporations.
Both want
access to everything that can be known about you, because who
knows until later what may prove the crucial piece of
information to uncover a terrorist network or lure in a new
network of customers. They want everything, at least, that can
be run through a system of massive computers and sorted into
patterns of various potentially useful kinds. You are to be, in
this sense, the transparent man or transparent woman. Your
acts, your life patterns, your rights, your codes are to be an
open book to them -- and increasingly a closed book to you. You
are to be their secret and that “you” is an ever more global
one.
3.
The Urge to Make Themselves Opaque
With this
goes another reality. They are to become ever less accessible,
ever more impenetrable, ever less knowable to you (except in the
forms in which they would prefer you to know them). None of
their codes or secrets are to be accessed by you on
pain of imprisonment. Everything in the government -- which
once was thought to be “your” government -- is increasingly
disappearing into a professional universe of secrecy. In 2011,
the last year for which figures are available, the government
classified
92 million documents. And they did so on the same principle
that they use in collecting seemingly meaningless or harmless
information from you: that only in retrospect can anyone know
whether a benign-looking document might prove anything but.
Better to deny access to everything.
In the
process, they are finding new ways of imposing silence on you,
even when it comes to yourself. Since 2001, for instance, it
has become possible for the FBI to present you with a
National Security Letter which forces you to turn over
information to them, but far more strikingly gags you from ever
mentioning publicly that you got such a letter. Those who have
received such letters (and
15,000 of them were issued in 2012) are legally enjoined
from discussing or even acknowledging what’s happening to them;
their lives, that is, are no longer theirs to discuss. If that
isn’t Orwellian, what is?
President
Obama offered this
reassurance in the wake of the Snowden leaks: the National
Security Agency, he insisted, is operating under the supervision
of all three branches of the government. In fact, the opposite
could be said to be true. All three branches, especially in
their oversight roles, have been brought within the penumbra of
secrecy of the global security state and so effectively coopted
or muzzled. This is obviously true with our ex-professor of
Constitutional law and the executive branch he presides over,
which has in recent years been
ramping up its own secret operations.
When it
comes to Congress, the people’s representatives who are to
perform oversight on the secret world have been presented with
the equivalent of National Security Letters; that is, when let
in on some of the secrets of that world, they find they can’t
discuss them, can’t tell the American people about them, can’t
openly debate them in Congress. In public sessions with
Congress, we now know that those who run our most secret
outfits, if pushed to the wall by difficult questions, will as a
concession respond in the “least
untruthful manner” possible, as Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper put it last week.
Given the
secret world’s control over Congress, representatives who are
horrified by what they’ve learned about our government’s secrecy
and surveillance practices, like Democratic Senators Ron Wyden
and Mark Udall, can
only hint at their worries and fears. They can, in essence,
wink at you, signal to you in obscure ways that something is out
of whack, but they can’t tell you directly. Secrecy, after all.
Similarly,
the judiciary, that third branch of government and other body of
oversight, has, in the twenty-first century, been fully welcomed
into the global security state’s atmosphere of total secrecy.
So when the surveillance crews go to the judiciary for
permission to listen in on the world, they go to a secret court,
a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court, locked within
that secret world. It, in turn, notoriously rubberstamps
whatever it is they want to do, evidently offering no resistance
whatsoever to their desires. (Of the 6,556 electronic
surveillance requests submitted to the court in Obama’s first
term in office, for instance,
only one was denied.) In addition, unlike any other court
in America, we, the American people, the transparent and
ignorant public, can know next to nothing about it. And you
know perfectly well why: the overriding needs of secrecy.
What,
though, is the point of “oversight” if you can’t do anything
other than what that secret world wants you to do?
We are, in
other words, increasingly open to them and they are increasingly
closed to us.
4.
The Urge to Expand
As we’ve
known at least since Dana Priest and William Arkin published
their stunning series, “Top
Secret America,” in the Washington Post in 2010,
the U.S. Intelligence Community has expanded post-9/11 to levels
unimaginable even in the Cold War era. Then, of course, it
faced another superpower, not a small set of jihadis
largely located in the backlands of the planet. It now exists
on, as Arkin says, an “industrial scale.” And its urge to
continue growing, to build yet more structures for surveillance,
including a vast $2 billion NSA repository in Bluffdale, Utah,
that will be capable of holding an almost unimaginable
yottabyte of data, is increasingly
written into its DNA.
For this
vast, restless, endless expansion of surveillance of every sort
and at every level, for the
nearly half-million or
possibly far more private contractors, aka “digital
Blackwater,” now in the government surveillance business --
about
70% of the national intelligence budget reportedly goes to
the private sector these days -- and the nearly
five million Americans with security clearances (1.4 million
with top security clearances, more than a third of them private
contractors), the
official explanation is "terrorism." It matters little that
terrorism as a phenomenon is one of the
lesser dangers Americans face in their daily lives and that,
for some of the larger ones, ranging from food-borne illnesses
to cars, guns, and what’s now called “extreme weather,” no one
would think about building vast bureaucratic structures shrouded
in secrecy, funded to the hilt, and offering Americans promises
of ultimate safety.
Terrorism
certainly rears its ugly head from time to time and there’s no
question that the fear of some operation getting through the
vast U.S. security net drives the employees of our global
security state. As an explanation for the phenomenal growth of
that state, however, it simply doesn’t hold water. In truth,
compared to the previous century, U.S. enemies are remarkably
scarce on this planet. So forget the official explanation and
imagine our global-security-state-in-the-making in the grips of
a kind of compulsive disorder in which the urge to go global,
make the most private information of the citizen everywhere the
property of the American state, and expand surveillance
endlessly simply trumps any other way of doing things.
In other
words, they can’t help themselves. The process, the phenomenon,
has them by the throat, so much so that they can imagine no
other way of being. In this mood, they are paving the way for a
new global security -- or rather insecurity -- world. They are,
for instance,
hiking spending on “cybersecurity,” have already secretly
launched the planet’s first cyberwar, are
planning for more of them, intend to
dominate the future cyber-landscape in a staggering fashion,
continue to gather global data of every sort on a massive scale,
and more generally are acting in ways that they
would consider criminal if other countries engaged in them.
5.
The Urge to Leak
The
massive leaks of documents by Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden
have few precedents in American history.
Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers leak is their only obvious
predecessor. They are not, however, happenstances of our
moment. They are signs of what’s to come. If, in surveillance
terms, the urge to go global and impose ultimate secrecy on both
the state’s secrets and yours, to
prosecute whistleblowers to the maximum (at this point
usually via the Espionage Act or, in the case of
Manning, via the charge of “aiding the
enemy,” and with
calls of “treason”
already in the air when it comes to Snowden), it’s natural that
the urge to leak will rise as well.
If the
surveillance state has reached an industrial level of
operations, and ever more secrets are being brought into
computer systems, then vast troves of secrets exist to be
revealed, already cached, organized, and ready for the
plucking. If the security state itself goes global, then the
urge to leak will go global, too.
In fact,
it already has. It’s easy to forget that WikiLeaks was
originally created not just for American secrets but any
secrets. Similarly, Manning uploaded his vast trove of secrets
from Iraq, and Snowden, who had already
traveled the world in the service of secrecy, leaked to an
American columnist living in Brazil and writing for a British
newspaper. His flight to Hong Kong and dream of
Icelandic citizenship could be considered another version of
the globalizing impulse.
Rest
assured, they will not be the last. An all-enveloping
atmosphere of secrecy is not a natural state of being. Just
look at us individually. We love to tell stories about each
other. Gossiping is one of the most basic of human activities.
Revealing what others don’t know is an essential urge. The
urge, that is, to open it all up is at least as powerful as the
urge to shut it all down.
So in our
age, considering the gigantism of the U.S. surveillance and
intelligence apparatus and the secrets it holds, it’s a given
that the leak, too, will become more gigantic, that leaked
documents will multiply in droves, and that resistance to
regimes of secrecy and the invasion of private life that goes
with them will also become more global. It’s hard from within
the U.S. to imagine the shock in Pakistan, or
Germany, or India, on discovering that your private life may
now be the property of the U.S. government. (Imagine for a
second the reaction here if Snowden had revealed that the
Pakistani or Iranian or Chinese government was gathering and
storing vast quantities of private emails, texts, phone calls,
and credit card transactions from American citizens. The uproar
would have been staggering.)
As a
result of all this, we face a strangely contradictory future in
which ever more draconian regimes of secrecy will confront the
urge for ever greater transparency. President Obama came into
office
promising a “sunshine” administration that would open the
workings of the government to the American people. He didn’t
deliver, but Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, and other leakers
have, and no matter how difficult the government makes it to
leak or how hard it cracks down on leakers, the urge is almost
as unstoppable as the urge not to be your government’s property.
You may
have secrets, but you are not a secret -- and you know it.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the
American Empire Project and author of
The United States of Fear as well as a history of the
Cold War,
The End of Victory Culture (just published in a
Kindle edition), runs the Nation Institute's
TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with
Nick Turse, is
Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on
Facebook or
Tumblr.
Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s
The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops,
Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.
Copyright
2013 Tom Engelhardt
No comments:
Post a Comment